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In 1961, the average full-time student at a four-year college in the United States studied about twenty-four
hours per week, while his modern counterpart puts in only fourteen hours per week. Students now
study less than half as much as universities claim to require. This dramatic decline in study time
occurred for students from all demographic subgroups, for students who worked and those who did not,
within every major, and at four-year colleges of every type, degree structure, and level of selectivity.
Most of the decline predates the innovations in technology that are most relevant to education and thus
was not driven by such changes. The most plausible explanation for these findings, we conclude, is that
standards have fallen at postsecondary institutions in the United States.